By Phil Pennington RNZ
Papers show the police’s intelligence systems essential to frontline crime fighting are in bad shape, but Government priorities have delayed a massive overhaul of them.
Police have known for years the ageing systems are “slow and error-prone while the demands on the Taclnt [tactical intelligence] analyst are for rapid collection of information and derivation of intelligence”, and that the way they are set up creates “a huge intelligence gap”.
But they only recently realised they must do a much bigger overhaul than expected, not just of their National Intelligence Application (NIA) but of Core Policing Services as a whole.
Yet they have now run into delays to that, due, says an internal paper, to the Government’s 100-day plan and having to cut spending.
The Government has stated its public sector savings moves would not affect the police front line.
Yet the internal papers secured under the OIA show police bosses were told in February: “The initial plan for completion of the Core Policing Services (CPS) Indicative Business Case (IBC) by 30 June [20]23 has been impacted by:
· Current management focus on ensuring delivery of the Government’s 100-day priorities and aligning to expectations
· Police’s financial situation and needing to reduce programme expenditure
· (A third reason is blanked out in the OIA)
The Government told RNZ on Sunday this was “an operational matter”, though it had asked police to find “efficiencies” and “programmes that don’t align with the Government’s priorities”.
Police’s deep-rooted intelligence problems, and calls to fix them, have been repeatedly laid out in internal reviews in 2011, 2015, 2018 and 2020, across more than 170 pages obtained by RNZ earlier.
An earlier assessment of the National Intelligence Application warned it was so “clumsy” and fragmented that searches routinely missed vital attachments in files - it contains more than 10 million files.
“This creates a huge intelligence gap.”
It said police must overcome the technical barriers to getting a full picture of crimes and threats “to prevent a 9/11 moment”.
But the police’s latest annual report warned: “Increased calls for service have created unsustainable demand on frontline staff, who are not enabled to deliver the service and outcomes New Zealanders expect.”
For instance, police are meant to finalise over 60 per cent of homicide, sexual assault, and serious assault investigations within 12 months; last year, they finalised under half that, or 29 per cent.
The investigation load, and front-line threats - such as the 2020 shooting death of Constable Matthew Hunt in West Auckland, and other gun violence - have fuelled a push into “data-driven” policing. But to work, this demands strong, well-resourced intelligence systems, documents show.
Yet the wing of police where intelligence analysts work has grown at just one-fifteenth the rate of corporate headquarters, adding just 70 staff in three years. Between 2020 and 2023, operational support - which backs up the front line - grew 2.7 per cent, versus 42 per cent for the corporate support wing; this was also double the 19 per cent the front line itself grew.
Operational support shrank as a proportion of all police staff, from 20.7 per cent to 18 per cent in 2023, while corporate support’s share rose from 6.7 per cent to 8 per cent of staff.
Meantime, police spending on contractors and consultants leapt last year to $135 million from around $50m two years before, propelled by IT demands.
There are more of those demands to come, even as the Government demands efficiencies.
The February paper newly released to RNZ stated police must press ahead with the mass CPS overhaul because “we are experiencing increasing challenges across operational policing which are negatively impacting both service journey delivery and our ability to deliver the services New Zealanders expect and deserve”.
“Our current technology landscape does not support our current and future requirements.”
Work has gone on since then. Various documents show police have spent several years and perhaps $3m a year since at least 2017 trying to stabilise and enhance the NIA. They struck repeated delays due to lack of expertise for hire.
However, the latest OIA papers show that last September police recognised this did not go far enough.
“Modernising or refactoring it [the NIA] will not give us the foundation we need to deliver the services New Zealanders expect and deserve now and into the future.”
They had been on the wrong track. The overhaul required “strong business ownership, and leadership of the capability shifts that large system change will enable - this has not been part of the NIA Modernisation work to date”.
They made the switch last September after a six-month investigation. The new tack, the overhaul of Core Policing Services, with the NIA at the heart of it, is envisaged as being integral to their so-called ReFrame programme, the grand plan “to enable police to deliver the services NZ expects now and into a rapidly changing future crime and technology environment”.
The OIA papers contain three pages of “significant challenges” police face but all the details are blanked out on the grounds of protecting free and frank advice. Elsewhere, challenges are listed as the “ability to gain insights” and “ability to change” and the “quality of data and information”.
A paper in September 2023 said police need to:
· “Be able to access, or be automatically alerted to relevant, up-to-date and trusted information from a single source of truth whenever they need it (eg. investigation, bail checks, evidence or case lifecycle) in the process about key topics (eg. people, their connections, locations).
· “Have the right information, including retrospectively, to enable strategic decision making, and to ensure we are correct as we interact with the public, supporting trust in police.”
The papers suggest they currently have a $10m budget for going on with, though it is not clear if this has been impacted by the cost savings they mentioned in February.
By last September, the managers were already three months behind on delivering the indicative (early) business case (IBC).
With the election of a new Government in October, the ground again shifted.
By February, the options for delaying the overhaul were laid out, alongside trying to “reduce the CPS programme ‘burn-rate’ to an absolute minimum, and engaging a smaller police leadership team to complete the IBC making the process more efficient and reducing organisational distraction”. RNZ has asked police what “burn-rate” means.
Another option was to call a temporary halt - but this would cause “significant loss” to the ReFrame project.
Police have not addressed questions put to them by RNZ on Friday, saying they need more time.
Police Minister Mark Mitchell told RNZ late on Sunday: “Delivering a CPS business case is an operational matter for police, and I will continue to be open to those discussions.
“As a Government we inherited a difficult fiscal situation, and we’re making steps to rebuild our economy.
“Police, along with everyone else, are facing cost pressures and competing priorities.
“As part of Budget 2024, the baseline savings exercise has asked police to identify efficiencies, programmes that don’t align with the Government’s priorities, and excess spending on backroom offices.”
Funding decisions had yet to be made as part of the ongoing Budget process, Mitchell said in a statement.
The documents suggest the police do not yet know the costs of the CPS overhaul. It is set to be completed by 2027. The funding implications of doing a new business case by November this year are also blanked out.
A separate project to replace the outdated and risk-filled 111 system fell victim to the previous Government’s cost cutting last year.
- RNZ